Full Frontal Fiction

by Jack Murnighan

  I wandered outside of the conference room to the desk where Alex was answering his messages and I stood over him. He was talking about meeting some people at a bar. He was saying he’d probably end up doing things he didn’t think he should do and saying things he didn’t want to say because that’s what happens whenever they all get together. Then he hung up the phone.

  I’m sorry, I began. I don’t want to bother you. I always feel so weird when I deal with musicians because there’s this kind of us-and-them thing going on—you know, we’re the press and you guys have to watch what you say when we’re around.

  Don’t be silly, he said. We’re all people.

  Well, I was just wondering, you once told me that you knew where I could get my tattoo fixed and—

  Give me your number and I’ll give you a call.

  You always say that, I said.

  I was moving at that point, for the third time in six months, and I couldn’t really be reached. I never gave Alex my new phone number. He told me where I could leave him a message when I settled in.

  But I never left one.

  Later that day, his publicist brought out a birthday cake for him. It was early in February, so I knew he was an Aquarius. I was sitting on the floor at that point, and as he walked out of the room I asked, How old are you? He didn’t answer, so I pulled his leg until he bent down and whispered, 31, in my ear.

  I lie down next to him but I have no interest in sleeping. I hope you don’t mind if I sleep, he says.

  Oh no. Of course not. You’re tired.

  I pull my skirt back down over my thighs as I sit up on the edge of the bed and feel my hair, how it sticks together, and touch my ear, which is not just gooey but also in pain from being pushed into so hard. My whole body has been pushed into pretty hard. I feel at my lobe that an earring is missing, but I get up to leave because I don’t want to look for it right now.

  Can you pass me the soda at the side of the bed? Alex asks.

  I hand him the liter-size bottle of Orangina, which he gulps down.

  Maybe I’ll go running, I say as if I’m looking for a better suggestion.

  You’re a very energetic girl, he says.

  Yes, I suppose.

  I stand up and look at him lying there. I think I’m going to marry my bed, he says. He starts telling me that he’ll be at a concert I am going to at the Bottom Line later on, but I know he won’t. I look at my watch. It’s 4:20. I arrived there at 3:30. Fifty minutes. Not bad.

  He shows me to the door, even though it means getting out of bed, not because he is being chivalrous but because the knob is broken and he knows I’ll never figure my way out alone.

  It was fun, I say, because that’s what you say. Let’s, um, do it again sometime.

  Yeah, he says.

  Did you have fun? I turn around and ask before I walk through the door. I want to know this because he didn’t come, at least not as far as I could tell.

  Yeah.

  I want to ask him why we did this since it seemed so unmonumental. I want to ask why he didn’t say the things men always do in bed, whether they mean them or not, like, Ah baby you’re so pretty. Or whatever. I want to ask what the point of this was but instead, the only words I say are, Do you do this often?

  What? Screw? Yes.

  No—invite strange women to your apartment to fuck?

  He doesn’t answer.

  When you asked me to come up here, did you know this was going to happen?

  Yes.

  I must be very naïve because I had no idea.

  I kind of doubt that.

  I do too, I think. But I realize that I really did assume we’d hang out, maybe go for a walk, maybe watch MTV, maybe get something to eat. I thought he was just one of me disguised as one of them. I thought heavy metal was just a show and offstage everyone is married and has kids and that the Jack Daniel’s in the bottle is really just iced tea because that’s what David Lee Roth once admitted. I thought that we were all people really.

  He opens his door to let me out. I tell him I really want to go for a ride on his motorcycle. You got $700? he asks.

  No, I tell him. No, I don’t.

  I’d like to go for a ride on my motorcycle too. Maybe we will when it gets repaired.

  I offer to try to get his cat out of the hospital, but he says he’s got people working on it already.

  I’ll see you tonight, he says as I turn to leave.

  The review had already been written before any of this stuff happened, so I didn’t feel conflicted about what I’d done. Of course, had I actually written the damn thing afterward, I wouldn’t have felt bad either because sex can be so separate from everything else, including feelings, including critical faculties, including my own judgment, which is usually pretty good.

  But the review came out on a Monday. I was up all night that night, finishing another assignment, and 5:30 Tuesday morning the phone rang. It was Alex. I didn’t know who Alex was when he first said his name, and then I put it together. I was about ready to go to sleep. Come over, he said. Come over right now. I’m going down to Washington in an hour, so you have to come here right now.

  I probably would have but I was tired. Not too tired to go there and hang out for an hour or so, but too tired for his breaking and entering routine. Too tired to fuck.

  I kept saying, I can’t. He kept saying, You can. He said, I won’t take no. I said, You’re going to have to. I said—confusing sex and love as usual—If I say no, will you still like me? He said, It’s not a matter of no because you’re going to come over here right now.

  I finally said yes to get him off the phone. But when I didn’t turn up at his door twenty minutes later, he called me three more times so we could go through the same discussion again.

  I saw your article, he said during one of the calls. It was great.

  Thank you, I answered. I’m glad you like it.

  Come over now. My ride will be here in an hour and I need to see you now. Besides, I’m running out of quarters.

  Alex, you’re crazy, I said.

  I know I’m crazy, but you’re crazy too.

  Why are you calling me now? Why not call me at a normal hour?

  Why are you awake now?

  I’ve been up all night. What about you?

  Same thing, he said. What he was trying to show me is that we are the same: we both don’t sleep at night. And there is a camaraderie that I feel with all nocturnal creatures, which is maybe why I love my cat, maybe why I feel bad that Alex doesn’t have his cat. But now he is mistaking me for one of him disguised as one of them. He doesn’t realize that I’ve been up all night working while he’s been up all night partying, mainlining, nodding off and drooling.

  And I know something isn’t right. When he calls me for the last time, I let the machine get it. I don’t go.

  Months have gone by. Maybe it’s been longer. Alex still doesn’t have a phone. Sometimes I think of leaving a message for him with the record company, but I never do.

  Sometimes I think of writing him a note, but I don’t know what to say. His band will be playing again soon and I know I can go to the gig if I want. It’s a free country. I can see him there, surrounded by girls, girls who don’t write for a living, girls who probably don’t do anything for a living. I can feel like shit if I like.

  But instead I walk by the building where he lives, day after day, night after night. I wonder why he’s never there. I wonder if he’s ever coming back. I wonder if I will ever see him again. I wonder how things would have been if I had gone there that morning, and sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t sending me some kind of cry for help, if maybe he wanted me to come over because he too was suffering from the intense loneliness that I feel day after day, night after night as I wait for something to happen to change to make my crazy life seem settled and then throw it to pieces again and make my settled life seem crazy. I wait for another Alex. Or maybe I just wait for Alex.

  I look for him all over my neighborhood. Eve
ry time I see a man on a motorcycle, I think it might be him, and then I see that the hair isn’t long and black, the stomach isn’t smooth and strong. A friend of mine said she saw him doing his laundry one day, so now I think every man with a bag of clothes might be Alex.

  I break up with my boyfriend. I look for a new apartment. I move around a lot. My phone number changes so many times and one day I realize I am in one place, my stuff is in storage in a warehouse on Avenue D, my cat is in my old apartment until I find a new one, there is an answering machine taking messages for me in still another place, and it feels like my life is disappearing. And I can’t find Alex anywhere. It is no comfort for me that if he wanted to, he couldn’t find me either.

  I feel everybody disappearing.

  I sit around the house doing nothing a lot. I lie in bed and listen to records, kidding myself that I am actually doing my job and then realizing that, in fact, I am doing my job. I hear Tom Petty singing: “But not me baby / I’ve got you to save me / Yer so bad / The best thing I ever had / In a world gone mad / Yer so bad.” And I know what he means. Maybe sometimes everything is so crazy that what’s worst for you is what’s best because if nothing really matters anyway then the one thing that might make you remember that you’re alive at all is something that’s black when you’re blue, something that’s wild when you’re so tamed you can’t even see to the other side of the cage much less consider escaping.

  And then I hear Don Henley: “I was either standing in your shadow / or blocking your light / Though I kept on trying I could not make it right / For you girl / There’s just not enough love in the world.” I feel certain he’s singing to me, that’s the sort of person I am. I watch my boyfriends, and there have been so many, so many more than I ever thought it would take to make me feel okay, and I see that after a while they all get that same baffled look on their faces, that shoulder-shrugging look that says I have no more ideas about how to make you happy so maybe I should just give up. In the beginning, every one of them thinks he will be The One, the savior, the person who will be different from the last failure who would dig ditches to China, who would stop traffic, who would fly across the country, who would wake up for phone calls at 4:38 A.M. just to hear me say, I feel such pain I don’t know why please help me.

  It never works for me with anybody because of the gaps—gaps between my legs and in my mouth and in my heart—that are maybe deeper and wider than the Mississippi, that love needs to fill up but there just isn’t enough of it. Never has been. Never will be.

  Late at night I feel desperate and think of calling old boyfriends who were never good enough when they were around but who I could maybe talk to right now to make it okay, but instead I roam the streets until the morning light peeks through, thinking about all the work I could get done in the time I spend feeling bad about all the things I don’t do, and I know that one of these days I’m just going to throw my body across Alex’s doormat and I’m not going to move until he comes back from the Far East or Avenue A or wherever he is because it would take something as empty as him to fill up a void like me.

  The Party Where Everyone Gets Theirs

  BY T. K. TAWNI

  I. NO MORE RENAISSANCE PICNICS

  My friend Bennie told me about a scene in a porn film in which a handful of executives in business suits sit drinking from tall glasses on lounge chairs beside a swimming pool. A young woman in a bikini is called over, and one of the men says, “Show us your asshole.”

  At my party they won’t even have to ask.

  II. MY PARTY

  It will be a time of judicious revelry, a time of cakes and ices, with other novelties thrown in for those friends who need to learn a particular lesson. My boss, Marlena, hypochondriac and Francophile, will have to listen to a loop of slow jams while trussed and wearing a ball gag. Nan, one of my dearest friends, will have her lipstick removed...directly from her lips. For years she has presented herself to men mouth-first, hungry and agreeable. That same mouth, denuded of hubris the next morning or afternoon, will moisten the telephone receiver for over an hour, pouring into my sweaty ear everything he said, what he might have meant, what he did, inquiring what I think might happen next. Also on the short list is Jerome, who I have nothing against personally except that he treated Nan badly during the two weeks they were lovers. I kept telling her how easy he’d be to punish, his vanity a fragile mushroom. Truth was, I’d wanted him for myself, but he hadn’t noticed. Fortunately, neither had Nan. You, Jerome, will have to be ugly all night: your carefully torqued hair, flattened; your sexy vintage shirt slashed from your Apollonian torso and replaced with a Blimpie uniform.

  III. IMPRESSIONISM

  Once, just as we were about to go at it, a guy asked me, the way a waiter inquires how you’d like your meat cooked, “What do you want me to do to you?”

  “Anything an airplane can do to a cloud,” I told him.

  My new lover, The Painter, in the moist calm of an afterfuck, asks gently, “What are your fantasies?” Which drops a certain pall on my afterglow. I cannot bring myself to tell about that scene from the long movie about the life of Christ, in which Mary Magdalene, wearing only jewelry and tattoos, gets fucked on a pallet in an open room while a line of guys with hard-ons stand waiting a turn; the party where everyone gets Mary. Instead I say something about a phone booth and something else about a ladder.

  IV. PANTIES

  In the midst of party planning, Bennie launches into a discourse on panties, remarking on how charmingly ill-fitting they are. “You know,” he says, “they’re so compromising, women have to pluck at the elastic all the time. Guys love that.”

  “They make them better now,” I assure him. “They hug right where they’re supposed to.”

  “Oh no,” he says. “Even on the little girls?”

  Then he wants to know what The Painter is going to get at the party. I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll tell him my most relentless fantasy, which begins with my ex-boyfriend Ford appearing at the screen door one evening, lit by the porch light. He has on a yellow T-shirt and red shorts. The kitchen is dark, and as I move through it I can see him, but he can’t see me. All I have to do is see him, and my erogenous zones, in the short time it takes to cross the kitchen, form a kind of Bermuda Triangle. I’ll already be lost, that is, by the time I reach the door.

  Should Ford ever truly reappear, there’ll be no pretending I don’t want it. I’ll want it. Whatever makes sex hallucinogenic and time-altering, like a drug, was always in the mix. We seemed as likely to fuck ourselves to death as save each other’s lives. The problem is, I remember everything: the living room that winter in the old farm-house, how the propane heater cooked the air, the green couch we dragged across the floor, not watching Scott of the Antarctic. The elevator in the public library. Fingerbangs and thumbfucks. The sweet round note of a choirboy he sometimes sang when he came.

  The problem is, you can’t live on any of that, but living without it seems like waiting.

  V. THE OPEN BOAT

  After Ford departed for Alaska there was the mechanic, a hale swimmer, against whose stomach and through the layers of my underwear and shorts I ground my pelvic bone and came three times, his mouth all over my tits. Once I was riding him and his knees were up and he did some butterfly motion with his legs that popped me off, but at the time, for some reason, I was thinking of the Kennedys.

  Next I took up with a cardiologist whom everyone endorsed because he had a good job and did not look like a doctor; he looked like a man with a motorcycle and a rap sheet. But he fucked like a doctor, if that’s not impolitic to say. He always wanted my legs straight, tightly together, sometimes locked at the heels. I always wanted my legs apart, my ass tilted up so every stroke he’d hit the sweet spot. When, after some weeks of this disjunctive choreography, I intimated a need for follow-up care so that I too could have an orgasm, he was surprised. For a woman, he asserted, coming was rather like dessert—sometimes it was part of the meal, and sometimes not. Who cared if he
had a good job?

  Now, as we approach the date of my party, there is The Painter, a dark and brooding man who rarely leaves his house. I go over there and drink the syrupy coffee he makes and smoke his hand-rolled cigarettes and can’t keep my hands still because I want them on his face. I want to put my mouth on his face. Everything I like I want to put in or against my mouth, including the flat part of my dog Pippa’s head. Bennie says I’m wearing the fur off, kissing her too much. He says The Painter is depressed, and that the kind of light I’ve got under my bushel should not be wasted on a sad renderer of old fruit and fierce self-portraits inspired by Rembrandt.

  “But what if I love him?” I say.

  “You don’t,” Bennie replies. “I’d be able to tell.” Ten years of observing my sexual behavior have given him an edge. I appreciate his candor, and the aspersion he casts lightly on my ability to know my own heart.

  My heart is an inveterate liar, though it means well. And everyone invited to my party is sick of hearing me wax on about these flash infatuations, inflated, as they tend to be, within an inch of exploding. When everyone gets theirs, I guess I’ll get mine too. It will be time to tell the truth: I have always wanted sex. I have pretended, to myself mostly, that I might love whoever-he-is in order to fool my body. A pox on me then, because those men are ambushed by the glazed look in my eye, the gyrations of my hips, the lube job, the open mouth; by the letters I send in the early days, addicted as I am to words and their power to persuade: “Dear X, I can’t do anything but think of you. And it makes me wet. I prop my feet on the kitchen table on either side of the typewriter and make myself come. It isn’t enough. I go to the couch and assume a four-point stance and press what Walt Whitman called the chuff of the hand hard against my clit, employ my middle finger for the in-and-out, cup my ass around the sensation and come, whimpering like a baby coyote. Get over here and put your mouth on me,” etcetera.